


Choice

by Fyre



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 12:01:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19790455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fyre/pseuds/Fyre
Summary: An angel wept once, for humanity and mankind, before a Fall and a world turned upside down. Too many questions, too many doubts, too many fears, too much standing between the wrath of Lucifer and of God and the small, helpless people on the earth.





	Choice

It is a popular misconception that angels weep and demons don’t.

Most angels don’t know how to weep and if they did, they would find the whole business messy and beneath them. Demons do from time to time to revel in the misery of it all.

An angel wept once, for humanity and mankind, before a Fall and a world turned upside down. Too many questions, too many doubts, too many fears, too much standing between the wrath of Lucifer and of God and the small, helpless people on the earth.

They really didn’t like that.

“You don’t need to hurt them,” he remembers saying, even if the days, weeks months around that day are still ragged and tattered. He can’t remember who he said it too anymore. Could have been above. Could have been below. “They’re– they’re helpless. They’re fragile and soft! Look at them! What good does harming them do?”

Testing, that was what it was.

Not just one side. Both sides.

Testing to prove who was right, testing to prove who could get the most, testing, testing, testing, when all those little people on the little rock wanted to do was live and be and breathe. Funny, he thinks, that the first act of his on the earth was to let them know about it all. Oh, not the specifics, of course. Couldn’t do that. But could open their eyes, let them see what the options were.

Options.

Something angels and demons were forbidden from having.

And yet… and yet, of all the ways to tempt them, he tempted them into taking the one thing angels and demons never got to have. And they chose to take it.

And six millennia later, another human caught between Hell and Heaven’s push and pull, another offer, another choice. The same choice, really. The choice to be. The choice to choose. The choice of Freedom from Their wishes.

“I like humans,” Crowley says, much, much, much later.

Aziraphale smiles that small knowing smile. “I had spotted that.”

Crowley slouches back in the deck chair. He doesn’t know where Aziraphale managed to find one of the old monsters, but he did and now, they have a couple of them for the patio of their cottage. “It’s daft,” he says, gesturing vaguely with his tumbler of whisky. “Daft little things. Lifespan of a blowfly to us, but…” He shrugs eloquently, all limbs. “I _like_ them.”

“You saved them.”

Crowley squints at the angel, then smiles crookedly. “Nah. S’other way round, angel.”

Aziraphale looks puzzled. Three bottles of fine wine does that to him. “Pardon?”

Crowley grins, turning his face back up to the sky. “We never saved them.” He points a wobbling finger at himself, then the angel, free from Heaven and Hell, free to be, free to choose. “Us. They saved us.”

He can hear the smile in the angel’s voice when he says, “Yes. I suppose they did. To humans, then, for saving us!”

Crowley raises his glass, remembering and apple and a sword and all the things that came before and all that came after, all the shards and confusion and pain and wonder and silly little lives that led him to be sitting on a deck chair with the being he loved most in all the world.

“To the humans,” he says, his throat tight with emotion.

And for the first time in millennia, a once-angel, once-demon, now-something-not-quite-either’s eyes stung with the warmth of happy tears.


End file.
